The Midnight Watch (21 page)

In the soft light of the desk lamp he looked again at the card the man had given him. ‘John Steadman,’ it said in plain type, ‘
Boston American
,’ and below that an address and telephone number. At the bottom of the card Mr Steadman had written in neat handwriting three simple words: ‘
Not your fault.’

*   *   *

When Stone took his usual brief walk ashore the following morning he was surprised to see that the report in
The Boston Post
was sympathetic to the captain.
LEYLAND LINER GOT NO SIGNALS
was the headline, and the story reported that the captain had given a ‘stout denial’ of the carpenter’s claims, and had said most definitely that his ship saw no rockets or other signals of distress.

‘You see, Mr Stone,’ the captain said to him at luncheon, ‘even in Boston the newspapers take no notice of silliness. Sailors are liars, and they know it. You need not worry about the carpenter.’

Stone took note of the word ‘you’. ‘No,’ he said, ‘perhaps I don’t.’

But he could not make himself believe it. The carpenter’s story may have flared and died away quickly, like a struck match, but he knew the glow of it remained out there in the world – tiny, but red-hot. It would flare again, and the city’s pressmen would come once more across the water to probe and discover.

So when, late in the afternoon as Stone strolled along the wharf to check the fore and aft drafts, Charlie Groves came running towards him, leaping bollards and dodging longshoremen, he knew what was coming.

‘Something’s happened,’ Groves panted. ‘Ernie Gill has gone to a newspaper. He’s sworn an affidavit saying he saw the rockets.’

Stone felt a strange calm. ‘Did he go to the
Boston American
?’

Groves stared. ‘How did you know?’

‘Just a guess.’

‘He’s on his way to Washington, right now – to testify at the inquiry! He’s taken his gear with him.’

Stone turned away and looked along the wharf to the harbour. The sun was now low behind the city, and the buildings were becoming dark against the brilliant reds and yellows that lay along the horizon. He imagined Gill out there amid those fiery colours, flying south on the Washington express, preparing to tell the senators all about the rockets.

‘The captain is furious,’ Groves went on, shifting his weight from foot to foot. When Stone turned back to look at him, at his large, round, perfectly smooth face, it appeared in the early twilight to be that of a child’s. The third officer was young, but he was wise too. Stone wished they were still close; he was sorry that this thing had come between them, that he had done something to make Charlie Groves ashamed of him.

‘You know,’ Groves said, ‘it’s my duty, I think, to tell you: I believe him. Gill, I mean. I think he did see the rockets. And I think he’s done the right thing in telling. It isn’t the sort of thing that should be kept secret.’ He paused, nodding slowly. ‘Yes. It’s my duty to say that. But, you know, he doesn’t mean it against
you
. You do know that, don’t you? He said to Sparks over and over again: “I don’t mean this against the second. I don’t mean it against the second.”’

Stone smiled indulgently, feeling as a parent might towards a child who’d said a silly but endearing thing. He knew that Groves thought he was doomed, and that he was saying goodbye.

‘Anyway,’ Groves said, taking Stone’s hand and shaking it solemnly, ‘good luck, my friend.’ And a moment later he was gone.

Stone headed back to the ship’s gangway. The longshoremen, at work all around him, ignored him. He could, he thought, keep walking along the wharf and out the gate and no one would stop him. He envied Gill – on that train, fleeing south, away from this ugly ship. Gill had simply packed his kit and left; he, Stone, could do the same. He could drift down to New York or Philadelphia and look for work. He could write to his wife and ask her to join him. Or he could go to Nantucket and find a job on a whaler, just like Ishmael. He could keep walking now and be free. But he trudged up the gangway and headed for his cabin. There he would rewrite his letter to the captain. It would be his final version, and this time every word of it would be true.

In the alleyway outside his cabin Groves intercepted him. He looked flustered. ‘The captain wants to see you,’ he said, ‘in the saloon.’

‘Of course he does,’ said Stone.

The electric lights in the saloon had been switched on and the oak panelling glowed. Chief officer Stewart sat at a dining table; Captain Lord, dressed in his full uniform, paced before it. His forehead was shiny with sweat, his cheeks flushed red, and a vein pulsed in his temple. By heaven, Stone quoted silently to himself, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

‘Thank you, Mr Stone, for joining us,’ the captain said as Stone took a chair at the table with the chief. ‘Gentlemen,’ he went on, stopping his pacing and turning to face them, ‘Mr Gill the donkeyman has gone to a newspaper and sworn some sort of document. It is full of lies but it makes things difficult for us. Mr Thomas from Leyland will be here shortly and so will the men of the press. Mr Thomas insists that we speak to them, and so we shall. I have assured Mr Thomas that what Mr Gill says is nonsense, all of it, and that we will be saying so. Mr Stone here has said to me – and written it – that whatever he saw that night, they were not distress rockets. Of course, if he had seen distress rockets he would have come and pulled me out. But he saw no such thing. He has said it, and now we all must say it.’

‘I do not wish to speak to them,’ Stone said.

Spittle had formed at the corners of the captain’s mouth. ‘It is very nice, Mr Stone, that you wish things and don’t wish things, but you
will
speak. Mr Thomas represents the owners of this ship – he knows that you were the officer of the watch when the
Titanic
met her end, being a clever man with facts and times. He insists you say something.’

Stone sat silently.

‘Mr Stone. You will be asked what you saw, and I must know what you will say.’

Stone tried to think.

‘You have told me you did not see distress rockets,’ the captain continued. ‘Now you must say it to the men of the press. Will you say it?’

Again Stone said nothing. He was thinking of the letter he’d been about to write to his captain.
I saw them …

‘Mr Stone,’ the captain pressed, ‘I must know: will you say it?’

Captain Lord’s gaze did not waver. Stone stared back at him. The man’s face, always as hard and impenetrable as polished armour, now showed subtleties of expression Stone had never seen before. The eyebrows were raised and drawn together; the wide, almost wild, eyes told him there was something other than rage in the captain. Stone was puzzled, but then, slowly, he understood: this was the moment he had imagined when he first went to sea, and for which he had waited ever since. His captain was asking his help – asking Stone to stand against the carpenter and the donkeyman, just as Ahab had asked Starbuck to stand with him against the whale. Close! Captain Lord was wordlessly pleading. Will you stand close to me, Mr Stone? Will you grapple with them, and from hell’s heart stab at them? Will you, for hate’s sake, spit your last breath at them?

Stone felt that he must say no, that he had thrown his copy of
Moby-Dick
overboard, that it was lost forever in the sea. But then a vision of Starbuck came to him, weeping on his cross of starlight, radiant and pure, and he heard Starbuck whisper to him: ‘Your soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman!’

Stone drew in breath to speak. But before he could give the captain his answer there was a loud knocking at the door, which opened to admit Mr Thomas, the ship’s agent. The large blubbery man heaved himself into the room blustering and smiling and wiping his hands on his dirty white suit.

‘Hello, old boys,’ he said, rolling a fat tongue around his red lips. ‘Now, just what has been going on in this odd little ship of yours?’

CHAPTER 13

I held Ernest Gill’s affidavit tightly in my hand as I stood in the shelter-deck alleyway waiting for Jack Thomas to emerge from the dining saloon. He was showing Captain Lord a copy of the affidavit. I could hear muffled murmurings.

It was early Wednesday evening and my story was still alive. That morning only one newspaper in Boston had run with the carpenter’s story – the
Post
– and that paper had dismissed the carpenter and stated its belief in the captain. I was pleased. It meant that a bigger hammer would be needed to crack the nut, and I would be the one to wield it. I was certain Gill’s affidavit was true, at least in essence, so what would his captain say when confronted with it? Would he now concede that rockets had been seen and reported to him? I thought that he must, and once he did, I would put to him my question: ‘Then why didn’t you go?’ But even if he did not concede, I had a strategy. I would press the second officer. Both times I’d seen him he seemed to me trapped, panicky and furtive. He wanted to tell the truth, I was sure of it. He only needed a gentle push.

So I’d persuaded Krupp to give me one more day to file the story. We’d paid for Gill’s affidavit, I reasoned, so we should use it.

I was not alone in the alleyway. Drunken Frank from the
Globe
had caught the ferry over with me and was now pressing his ear up against the door of the saloon. The old man had an uncanny nose for news; he could be counted on to be snooping around at inconvenient times. He said he was just following up the
Clinton Daily Item
story – the rumours from the carpenter – but I knew he had somehow found out about Gill’s affidavit.

‘Hear anything?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

In his affidavit, Gill had sworn, ‘I had been on deck about ten minutes when I saw a white rocket about ten miles away on the starboard side. I thought it must be a shooting star. In seven or eight minutes I saw distinctly a second rocket in the same place, and I said to myself, That must be a vessel in distress.’

I imagined Lord reading those words, and thought how loud they must ring in his brain. And tomorrow they would be published for the world to see. ‘The captain had been notified … Mr Stone, the second navigating officer, was on the bridge at the time…’ Every sentence was fired through with truth and indignation. ‘I have no ill will towards the captain … I am actuated by the desire that no captain who refuses or neglects to give aid to a vessel in distress should be able to hush up the men.’

The document had a formal, almost pompous tone, yet every word had been chosen by Gill himself. And Gill was right. The men should not be hushed up. I wondered what Lord would say about it all.

I had not long to wait. The door was pulled open and fat Jack Thomas pushed into the alleyway, closing the door behind him. I could see he’d had a long day. There were dark patches under the arms of his suit, his lips were stained purple by something he’d eaten, and he had rubbed a red substance of some kind into his cheeks. He surprised me by launching into a lengthy and energetic tirade against the affidavit and its deponent. He waved a copy of the document in the air, he gasped and spluttered, he said it was all rubbish! Perfectly absurd! Ridiculous!

‘Yes, yes, but can we go in?’ asked old Frank, blowing his nose into a loose scrap of paper.

Thomas gave a snort; his face was alight. He sucked in air and drew himself up. ‘You people,’ he said, wiping spit from his mouth with a damp handkerchief, ‘you snoop around, always looking for your mud – bribing poor young boys who know no better. You should be ashamed of yourselves.’

‘I am very ashamed,’ said Frank, taking some refreshment from a narrow flask. ‘But can we go in now? Some of us have homes to go to.’

I was not at all sure that Frank did have a home to go to, but Thomas obliged his request, easing himself backwards against the saloon door. It opened; we shoved forward. The room was gracefully appointed – polished boards, splendid wood panels, electric lights with red and yellow glass shades – but I paid little attention to that: I was transfixed by the four men at its centre. The captain and his officers stood stiffly in their uniforms, just as they had when I first saw them. They seemed to fill the chartroom then, but now, in this larger room, they seemed small. As soon as I saw Lord – the stony coldness of his anger, the ramrod straightness of his back – I knew. He was going to deny it all.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, without waiting for introductions or niceties. ‘This document from Mr Gill is bosh – utter bosh. I have already told you fellows: sailors will say anything when they are ashore.’

And so will captains, I thought.

Lord then spoke authoritatively of latitudes, longitudes, speeds, distances and times. He told us of the international rules relating to the visual range of navigation lights. He invited us to make calculations. Frank and I wrote down numbers and the captain drew for us the inevitable conclusion: his ship could not have seen the
Titanic
, and Mr Gill’s affidavit was ‘poppycock’.

But I was ready for all this. I asked the captain no questions, but turned instead to his second officer, who stood silently on one side.

‘What about you, Mr Stone?’ I asked, deliberately using his name. ‘Did you see any rockets during your watch?’

There was a loud silence. Frank stopped writing and looked up. We both waited.

‘Mr Stone?’ I prompted. ‘Did you see any distress rockets?’

The length of the silence became embarrassing. I thought, This man cannot lie. He will not lie for his captain. Herbert Stone simply stared straight ahead.

‘
I
was on watch at the time, and I saw no distress rockets.’

It was the chief officer who’d spoken. For a short, thin man his voice had a penetrating resonance. The saloon’s electric lamps lit up his cavernous sunken cheeks with a fiery glow and seemed to give him a threatening power. He stared directly at me, as if daring me to challenge him. He was not a man who was often contradicted, I guessed.